American Inheritance: Liberty And Slavery In The Birth Of A Nation

The New York Review: The Contradictory Revolution, by David S. Reynolds (CUNY; Google Scholar) (reviewing Edward J. Larson (Pepperdine)), American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795 (2023):

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of American Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

In American Inheritance the historian Edward J. Larson deals with topics that have recently become politically divisive—the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution. He doesn’t explicitly comment on today’s cultural divide, but he presents important information that illuminates the arguments on both sides.

According to the widely publicized 1619 Project, the American Revolution was largely driven by whites who fought to protect the institution of slavery against British abolition. In this interpretation, the proclamation of emancipation by the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, in November 1775 becomes central. As a military measure, Dunmore offered freedom to enslaved people if they joined the British Army, setting off a rush to his banner by Black fugitives. Anger over the sudden loss of enslaved workers, the argument goes, prompted formerly reluctant southerners to join northerners in the rebellion against England. America’s Founders hypocritically preached liberty despite holding people in bondage, and traditional historians have wrongly minimized the enslavement, segregation, and legal maltreatment of Blacks, whose ongoing fight against injustice contributed significantly to democratic rights. The boldest expression of this view came from the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project: “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” As for Abraham Lincoln, although he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he “opposed black equality.”

Several historians publicly challenged Hannah-Jones’s interpretation of the Revolution and Lincoln. The right, meanwhile, inflamed the issue. …

Most professional historians resist the simplifications they witness in the culture wars. It is generally agreed that the Founding Fathers, while forward-thinking idealists, were hardly paragons by today’s standards and that people of different ethnicities made significant contributions to the creation of the United States. In American Inheritance, Larson, a professor at Pepperdine University whose previous books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997), develops this more evenhanded interpretation, providing a wonderful overview of the American Revolution fromboth the African American and the white perspectives.

Larson mines the speeches, laws, private writings, and newspaper articles of the Revolutionary era to discover the actual motivations, North and South, for joining the battle against Britain. He reveals a complex history. Several of the Founders, slaveholders or not, opposed slavery, though the institution survived because of compromises struck at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Larson shows that the involvement of enslaved and free Blacks in bringing about justice for all was more important than is generally acknowledged. The same is true of women, who have been unfairly marginalized in many histories of the period. …

Larson could have pursued in more detail the long-term aftermath of the Revolution. He correctly shows how the nation emerged from the Revolutionary era deeply divided over slavery. He mentions that Lincoln expressed this national rift in his 1858 “house divided” speech and later promoted the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery. However, Larson might have completed his historical record of the contest between liberty and slavery by discussing how Lincoln used the Founders as his basis for pointing the nation in a new antislavery direction. Such an attentive analysis of Lincoln would have fit well into Larson’s examination of paradoxical Americans, because, like many of the Founders, Lincoln sometimes made bigoted pronouncements on race or Black removal, though he evolved and ultimately called for African American suffrage. It would be fascinating to hear Larson’s take on Lincoln’s argument in his Cooper Union Address, in February 1860, about the framers’ fundamentally antislavery position, or his emphasis in the Gettysburg Address on the Declaration’s message of human equality, or his invocation of a God-directed eternal war on slavery in his militantly emancipationist Second Inaugural Address.

But if Larson doesn’t fully explore the flowering of America’s ideals in Lincoln, he shows convincingly that the Founders reflected the customs and attitudes of their era while at the same time pushing the nation toward human rights. He makes them available for realistic praise at a moment when they are either too easily pushed aside or placed on too high a pedestal.

For more on Ed Larson's work, see: